My name is Taylor, and I am passionate about the visual communication of complex information, especially where it concerns the relationship between people and the environment. I work as User Interface Designer for eBird at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Featured Work

One of my main NPMap projects of 2015-2016 was the development of data and custom basemap design for the Yellowstone mobile app, released in May 2016. I was assigned to lead content development for the Yellowstone app. I visited the park for two weeks in the Fall 2015, traveling all over the park to collect site locations and attribute data. I worked closely with park staff over the proceeding months to help them make decisions about how content would be organized, and I worked with GIS staff to collect data for inclusion on the custom basemap.

One of my main responsibilities as a Cartographer at NPMap – Park Tiles – a suite of online basemaps designed to fit the National Park Service’s graphic identity. Park Tiles includes four basemap styles: Standard, Imagery, Slate, and Light. It is used widely across the park service for a number of different mapping applications.

Through my graduate assistant position at U-Spatial, I was asked to design this map for inclusion in an academic paper written by Robert McCaa and Nathan Weaver Olson. The paper reconsiders the notion that Francisco Pizarro's second voyage to South America introduced smallpox to the continent. The map is not designed to tell the whole story on its own – it serves as visual support to the more complex narrative offered in the paper, placing the timeline in its proper geographic context.

This interactive map shows time-animated Osprey sightings in 2013, based on data submitted to eBird. The purpose of this project was to experiment with querying the massive eBird dataset (over 150 million records) using a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, and visualizing the results using CartoDB.

After designing a static map of eBird data in my first year of grad school, I decided to make thisinteractive version in my second year to submit to the U-Spatial Mapping Prize. The map features every bird watching list submitted to the eBird Project in 2012 in the contiguous US. Each point is displayed as a tiny translucent green dot – the more submissions pile up, the brighter the green gets. By displaying the data in an interactive map, you can have a lot more fun zooming in and panning around specific regions to have a closer look at where birders are birding.

In 2002, The Cornell Lab or Ornithology and National Audubon Society launched the eBird project – a real-time, online checklist to collect bird observations voluntarily submitted by the general public. In ten years, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds.